SLAYER - Repentless

The last few years can't have been easy at all for Slayer, a cult band for metal fans and (alongside Metallica and Megadeth) inventors and pillars of that subgenre known as thrash metal. The death in 2013 of Jeff Hanneman, founding member and author of a good chunk of Slayer's essential songs, along with the voluntary departure of drummer Dave Lombardo, would have sunk pretty much anyone else. Kerry King and Tom Araya, the two survivors of the original line-up, nonetheless decided to roll up their sleeves and keep moving along the path they laid out some twenty years ago.

What's certain is that the comparison with "Reign In Blood", the band's 1986 album that became an all-time classic, remains unavoidable. That's because, over the course of their career, Slayer have never once tried to deviate from their original blueprint. Sure, there have been somewhat less focused efforts along the way – their last record, "World Painted Blood", above all – but the band's fidelity to thrash has never been in question, to the delight of their most die-hard fans. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up for subjective debate; that it's hard to match the levels of excellence reached in the past is, however, an objective fact.

There's certainly no shortage of successful moments: "Repentless", the album's title track and driving single (complete with a slickly made video), "When The Stillness Comes", which offers glimpses of carefully crafted melody, and "Atrocity Vendor", whose short runtime recalls the sheer essentiality of the songs on "Reign in Blood".

The rest of the material, however, falls short of expectations. The album, like most of the band's recent output, runs a total length that reveals an excess of editing ill-suited to Slayer's own purposes. Paul Bostaph's drumming, while commendable, can't help but highlight the difference, for the worse, with the double-bass work once delivered by the phenomenal Dave Lombardo. Equally fruitless is the effort put in by Gary Holt of Exodus, tasked with the unenviable job of replacing the late Hanneman: his guitar and King's intertwine as expected, but Holt's parts often come across as secondary, perhaps precisely to avoid comparison with Hanneman's inventiveness and sudden bursts of speed.

The intention to restore the band's name to its former glory, to keep pushing forward along a clearly defined and undeniably uncomfortable path, is admirable without a doubt. The fact remains that the absences are felt loud and clear, and that the lyrics, once provocative, now give way to superficial and at times banal lines: "A little violence is the ultimate drug, let's get high!", from "Vices", is a glaringly obvious example.

Ultimately, this is an album that will please die-hard fans but that, a few standout moments aside, leaves a bitter taste for everyone else, who remember a band that, within its own genre, proved capable of being great if not outright magnificent, and now finds itself chasing the ghost of its former self.

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30/10/2015